History

AGADA Biosciences was founded in 2013 by Drs. Kanneboyina Nagaraju and Eric Hoffman as a spin-off of Children's National Medical Center in Washington DC.

At Children's National, Dr. Nagaraju had worked extensively with the TREAT-NMD network and others to develop robust standard operating procedures (SOPs) for outcome measures in pre-clinical drug trials in murine models of neuromuscular disease. This was in response to the need for reproducible pre-clinical efficacy studies to de-risk potential therapeutics before moving to human clinical trials. Dr. Nagaraju's pre-clinical efficacy 'core' at Children's National had outgrown capacity at this academic medical center, and it was agreed to spin off this effort to AGADA.

In parallel, Dr. Hoffman had developed molecular diagnostic methods for patient muscle biopsies in neuromuscular disease while at University of Pittsburgh and Children's National Medical Center, including robust methods for characterization of dystrophin in muscle biopsies. The accelerated approval pathway possible at FDA required stringent bioassays for dystrophin detection. Further, there was a need for helping clinical trial sites in training and processing of flash-frozen muscle biopsies. AGADA Biosciences was formed to meet this need.

AGADA is housed in 14,000 sq ft of newly renovated laboratory and office space in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia. AGADA draws upon the outstanding talent pool in biomedical sciences from regional universities.